N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html

by ebildsten • 13 years ago

923 388 13 years ago

nytimes.com

uptown• 13 years ago

This essentially bolsters the claims in this article that the NSA has "neutralized" SSL.

http://rt.com/usa/allegations-nsa-tool-decrypts-https-085/

lazyjones• 13 years ago

This "SSL Locksmith" software isn't really a top-secret NSA tool: http://www.accessdata.com/products/cyber-security/ssl-locksm...

It's a MITM solution that injects fake certificates, i.e. nothing groundbreaking and equivalent to compromised/corrupt CAs (which, as we know, exist and are able and willing to hand out fake intermediate certs etc. to rogue entities). The Whole CA ecosystem is broken and basically snake oil and pretty much everyone knows it.

dailyrorschach3• 13 years ago

This is likely a minority view, but I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job. Decoding encryption has long been part of their mission. I also suspect they're not alone in terms of signals intelligence groups in having this capability.

The issue to me has always been how and what data they access and store, and how it is used.

mhurron• 13 years ago

If the NSA can, others can. It makes the whole thing useless.

draugadrotten• 13 years ago

Encryption is still useful. The NSA can read your messages - but not everyone. Encryption will still protect your bank transactions and wikipedia reading. No encryption will protect you from a goverment turned Evil, and I hope you realise this. If the US government is good or evil is all a matter of perspective. War is peace, Mr O wrote, and surely there has been a lot of that going on in US foreign policy the last few decades.

a3n• 13 years ago

I guess I'm with you on the ability to crack. Any researcher should be able to try as hard as they want, and succeed.

I draw the line at collecting everything without specific warrants, regardless of what they do with it, against their charter and the Constitution.

I draw the line at hardware backdoors for equipment that I buy, and insertion of vulnerabilities into encryption standards that I take advantage of. Or I guess I should say that take advantage of me.

dailyrorschach3• 13 years ago

I'd agree with that. I've often been wondering if where we're headed is a some kind of reform compromise. Not that I think it's ideal or right, but for example I could see the NSA having a Chinese wall around data for Americans, such that FBI and other investigators could not use data collected by the NSA, but could open their own collections with a warrant.

I'm quite opposed to what the NSA has done - but I don't see anything happening that will change it. If the recent revelations haven't done anything to stir Congress to action I don't know what will. Additionally, until and/or unless the NSA ever uses data collected this way against an American citizen in a judicial/criminal way, the courts are quite likely to find that petitioners lack any standing.

haakon• 13 years ago

The larger issue here is that they "covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards". It's not that they cleverly and fairly break encryption, it's that they sabotage the standards.

smtddr• 13 years ago

I have a problem with encryption being breakable, regardless of who's doing the breaking. I want encryption to be mathematically solid with the only option being brute-force older-than-age-of-earth time. When we get to quantum computing, then I don't know what we'll do...

gizmo6862• 13 years ago

Quantom computing cannot break all of crypto. Anything based on P!=NP is believed to be secure against quantom computing, and there are several encryption methods backed by P!=NP

tubbzor4• 13 years ago

Everyone focuses on the decrypting power of quantum computing, which is warranted as it will break _modern_ cryptography (in theory). However, think about the encrypting power a quantum computer will have; being able to generate completely random keys among other facets of crypto that seem implausible with modern computers. I think it will just open the door to a whole new science of crypto we haven't reached yet.

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

If we get quantum cryptography out the door in a reasonable space of time, then we can do secure one time pad exchanges on there. Doesn't matter what you throw at that, since with the right keys you can derive any message of the same length from it.

jonknee5• 13 years ago

I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job.

Their "breaking" of encryption is a combination of purposefully introducing vulnerabilities into standards, surreptitiously altering software and hardware to give the NSA a backdoor, hacking into private systems and stealing keys, etc etc.

I'm cool with an NSA super computer trying to brute force my VPN traffic to YouTube, I'm not cool with the NSA planting an engineer at a chip fab and changing designs to add a backdoor (a backdoor that could also be exploited by other actors).

XorNot6• 13 years ago

I will bet good money that the NSA has never bothered to try and plant backdoors in encryption standards.

If the NSA recommends AES to the US government, but knows there's a vulnerability, then they have to assume that any adversary may be as good as whoever designed it. Which means an adversary would be perfectly capable of discovering and exploiting the weakness. Which in turn means the NSA has just made the entire US government vulnerable to foreign or non-state actors.

The same applies to anything you might imagine doing to chipmakers. Not only is there the risk of being found out (how do you explain to a talented engineer spotting a flaw in a schematic, how high up do you have to go to try and stop that leaking?) but there's the more serious risk that you've just added a backdoor to hardware you yourself need to be secure. Which again, could be discovered by an adversary and used against you.

This whole line of argument has always been speculative fiction on the part of the internet: it's looking for unicorns because you heard hoofs.

stdgy• 13 years ago

The problem isn't that they're working to break encryption. The problem is that they're maliciously inserting backdoors and subverting crypto-research and publication, which puts all of our security at risk. (Not to mention runs counter to their stated mission)

mullingitover• 13 years ago

It's definitely great knowing that our government is willing and able to commit pretty serious industrial espionage, and if anyone tries to do anything about it, hey, we have nukes too. Don't worry everyone, we're the good guys! We promise to send you some foreign aid after you've come to terms with your subjugation. /s

alasdair_3• 13 years ago

There are a couple of other issues, even if one agreed with your view:

1. They obviously can't keep their own secrets, so it's unlikely that they will do any better than keeping yours. Eventually, your data will leak out to non-NSA people.

2. By adding backdoors, they weaken the encryption. This implies that anyone with sufficient skill who goes looking for backdoors may be able to exploit the hole that the NSA opened up. This is a big deal, especially if you have secrets that you need to protect.

eruditely• 13 years ago

We cannot rely on them to be always good so we have to also have the prior, encryption to protect us if the law or law makers are not working for our best interest.

yuhong2• 13 years ago

"Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members."

Wonder if it is referring to the Dual_EC_DRBG RNG.

lambda12• 13 years ago

Well, it goes on to say "Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency." The Dual_EC_DRBG vulnerability was revealed by two Microsoft researchers in 2007: http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

So I'd say yes, it sounds like that's what they're talking about.

Speaking of which, I'm really quite frustrated how many of these recent reports about the NSA elide the technical details. You have to read between the lines to figure out what's really going on, what weaknesses there really are.

As a matter of security, it would be better to know specifically what vulnerabilities there really are. Merely the announcement of vulnerabilities can allow a dedicated black-hat to find and exploit it; but someone who's trying to secure their system, and isn't following cryptography incredibly closely, won't know what they need to do or change to make their systems more secure against these types of attacks.

There's a reason that the security community advocates for full disclosure (or at least responsible disclosure, if it's possible to selectively disclose to a few vendors so they can do a coordinated release that fixes the vulnerability before it becomes public), in which you completely disclose a vulnerability so people aren't left guessing about it.

mcherm5• 13 years ago

Speaking of which, I'm really quite frustrated how many of these recent reports about the NSA elide the technical details.

Are you? Well please sign up to work for the NSA, learn the technical details, then go public with them. The reason that the NYTimes isn't publishing the technical details is because they DON'T KNOW THEM. (They might not publish them if they did.) They don't know them because Edward Snowden was a system administrator not a cryptography expert and he's releasing memos about the process.

pedrocr3• 13 years ago

I assumed it was that and that case is puzzling but benign as the algorithm is much too slow to be chosen compared to the alternatives[1]. As far as anyone can tell this wasn't their best work:

If this story leaves you confused, join the club. I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard. It makes no sense as a trap door: It's public, and rather obvious. It makes no sense from an engineering perspective: It's too slow for anyone to willingly use it. And it makes no sense from a backwards-compatibility perspective: Swapping one random-number generator for another is easy.

[1] http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html

16s3• 13 years ago

Normal people don't need 256-bit symmetric encryption. That's assault encryption and should only be used on the battlefield. 40-bits is enough and anything over that should be banned.

I'm only joking, but the same argument is used against other technologies that governments seek to control/dominate.

Edit: Skipjack was 80-bits I think. It was used in Clipper Phones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_(cipher)

yuhong2• 13 years ago

The funny thing is 56-bit encryption is still in use in the form of PPTP with MS-CHAPv2. I bet most of the decrypted VPN traffic mentioned in the article uses that.

voltagex_3• 13 years ago

Yep, I'm ashamed I didn't make the connection last week when I signed up for a PPTP VPN. They've been broken for a while now.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

People don't take a 256-bit cryptoalgorithm into a middle school and kill kids with it, so I don't think the analogy works exactly. Maybe if you print it out on paper, or use a floppy disk or CD, you could cut a few people.

dictum3• 13 years ago

People who intend to enter a middle school and kill kids can hide their plans and communications using 256-bit encryption.

Edit: Devil's advocate.

mason240• 13 years ago

It is used to aid in the creation and distribution of child pornography, so the analogy is exact - unless of course you don't view the molestation of those middle schoolers to be an attack on them (as the downvotes seem to indicate).

jaibot• 13 years ago

Another difference: You don't need a gun to perform the most basic of functions securely.

They occupy exactly opposite quadrants on the useful/dangerous axis.

dictum3• 13 years ago

"The NSA is just doing its job."

w_t_payne2• 13 years ago

In a sense, yes. In fact, it is good that they put the effort into breaking these systems, and good that Snowden let us know about it. Now we know that the vulnerabilities exist, we can go about fixing it.

ternaryoperator2• 13 years ago

"the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards."

This is the part that truly disgusts me.

abat• 13 years ago

I think people were speculating this on HN with this article: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...

kamjam3• 13 years ago

Why are you surprised, or even disgusted? They've moved on from governments (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23762970) to using technology to do it. I use the term "moved on" loosely, because it is still happening no doubt. The US has long used it might and influence around the world, esp Latin America, to do very questionable things and really no one has batted an eye lid apart from the little guys getting screwed over. Terrorism is the just the new guise they are using to justify their actions.

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

This is mostly a confirmation of what has been supposed: No magic, mostly bribed and coerced cooperation from the people who should be keeping our communications secure.

And while it doesn't do anything for the credibility of US-based companies, N.B.: "hardware and software developers around the world."

devx• 13 years ago

So, should we re-evaluate if Intel/AMD's chips (and possibly even the new ARM ones) contain hardware backdoors for the NSA?

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

I would assume the NSA has evaluated every plausible attack, and implemented them based on what they want to get out of it, and that they have global reach into chips, peripherals, and software.

If you are a foreign government, hostile or friendly, I don't see much of a case to made for "Naw, they wouldn't..." They would, they probably can, and the probably already did.

If you are a consumer, the main problem is the creepiness factor. Who wants to use incrementally more technology if along with it you get incrementally more surveillance?

tubbzor4• 13 years ago

If the source code/hardware diagrams are kept private you should assume backdoors, always, with everything. How is there any other way to know for sure otherwise?

These government agencies are obviously dug much deeper in private industry than many expected so I wouldn't put it past them

D9u2• 13 years ago

The backdoors are already there...

http://www.techspot.com/news/41643-intels-sandy-bridge-proce...

Achshar3• 13 years ago

So does this means they have broken or fund a bug in RSA, fast enough computers to brute force or solved the P versus NP problem. In decreasing chances of possibility. I am also an encryption noob, so I gather that if they have broken a crypto then my 4096 bit files will be no more secure than 1024 bit ones. Right?

patdennis• 13 years ago

If they solved P vs NP... well. Yeah. That would be interesting.

jessaustin• 13 years ago

Well, if they found a constructive proof, that is.

_phred3• 13 years ago

The best publicly known attacks on RSA reduce the attack time by a few orders of magnitude at best. A functional quantum CPU could reduce that by a few more orders. Your 4096-bit RSA key is still 2^3072 times harder to break, so even with reductions we're still talking about "heat death of the universe" amounts of time to brute force.

RSA has issues but as of yet hasn't yielded entirely to cryptanalysis.

As the article says, it's easier to attack the system and try to get the plaintext, or coerce you into giving up your key through legal means.

Edit: adding a link to Wikipedia's article on post-quantum crypto, it's a good place to start understanding how to answer these type of questions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

Are you sure about that? As far as I understand it, generic quantum computation would cut that '3072' in half, and using quantum computers specifically for factoring reduces problems to a low polynomial time.

pja3• 13 years ago

"Your 4096-bit RSA key is still 2^3072 times harder to break,"

No, because the difficulty of breaking RSA keys doesn't scale in the same way as symmetric encryption. Integer factorisation is much easier than a brute force search of the keyspace. A 1024-bit RSA key is believed to be roughly equivalent to an 80-bit symmetric key. A 3072 bit key is about as hard to brute force as an 128-bit symmetric key.

(Source: http://www.keylength.com/en/4/ )

Achshar3• 13 years ago

But what if they have some vulnerability in the crypto itself? thus skipping the need to brute force.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

Can someone who actually knows about encryption comment on whether it's actually physically feasible for the NSA to have actually broken, say, SSL 3.0 (which has 128 bits of entropy, IIRC) on a large scale (i.e., when you're sifting through petabytes of data on a daily basis)?

And if this were really an issue, couldn't you just use 4096-bit RSA (unless they have managed to surreptitiously insert a backdoor in it)?

jonknee5• 13 years ago

Brute force is only required if there isn't a vulnerability (either in the algorithm or that the NSA has a key).

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”
N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

regularfry2• 13 years ago

Neither of those apply to SSL 3.0, do they?

pfortuny• 13 years ago

It might be but it is highly dubious. However, they MIGHT have put some effort into "plugging" each implementation and planting a subtle bug in them. You never can tell.

It is not somuch the protocol what matters but the implementations.

Imagine they "rig" all those beatiful hardware RNG. Could you tell the difference?

Are you sure renowned developer X van Y is not an NSA mole?

Canada• 13 years ago

Remember the OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegation?

https://lwn.net/Articles/420858/

kylec2• 13 years ago

SSL relies on a chain of trust, and it's prudent to assume that the NSA has the private keys necessary to produce valid certificates that will be accepted by the certificates that ship with Windows, OS X, Firefox, etc out of the box.

So man-in-the-middle attacks are certainly within their capability and fairly hard to detect. As to whether the NSA can passively intercept and decrypt SSL traffic, I don't know, but they may not need to.

joelhaasnoot2• 13 years ago

How are they hard to detect? Wouldn't solutions like certificate pinning prevent this?

lemonade• 13 years ago

You want to use something like TLSpool (http://www.tlspool.org) and DANE. For a browser something like Firefox's Certificate Patrol is a great solution.

cliveowen• 13 years ago

It looks like there's no chance for even the slightest expectation of privacy. Even if the data is encrypted they can ask American companies to decrypt it, after all they store the encryption keys. Even if the encryption keys are stored on the client side, they can push fake updates through major browsers or straight out compel American companies to insert backdoors in their software (e.g. Google Chrome) and get access to those keys. Our reliance on these services is what most likely would need to be avoided in the pursuit of privacy, but could you live without Google Search, Google Maps, GMail, Outlook, and on and on?

mpyne8• 13 years ago

The protocol itself would still seem to be safe (or rather, have safe combinations of key exchange and encryption).

But it is certainly feasible that if they manage to find cracks in popular-but-old communications protocols that they are able to automatically decrypt them, or use prior key recovery successes to bootstrap fast attacks on new communications from the same host.

What would be interesting is if NSA's own "Suite B" crypto recommendations are susceptible to these risks, as that would potentially represent a rather significant break in the U.S.'s own COMSEC, and COMSEC is one of the things NSA is very specifically tasked with ensuring are safe with no backdoors for anyone to jump through.

mindslight5• 13 years ago

Backdoors in the NSA recommendations could be due to trapdoor functions that only NSA has the key for. Other parties would therefore be unable to utilize that backdoor (short of the secret being exfiltrated).

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

Your self-signed 4096-bit key is probably fine. Even better, be your own CA.

People assume CAs should be trusted but it's a huge game of chicken: If the NSA can't break SSL, you have to assume that either SSL is opaque to them, which these revelations seem to contradict, or they have corrupted the CAs.

eli2• 13 years ago

Or that SSL is irrelevant because they've tapped whatever service you're connecting to.

PeterWhittaker• 13 years ago

Well, it's not that simple, is it? Generally speaking, the public key algorithm used in SSL is used to protect the private key that is used to protect the data:

1) Site sends public key certificate to browser. 2) Browser verifies certificate against in-browser store. 3) Browser extracts public key from certificate. 4) Browser generates symmetric/private key. 5) Browser encrypts that symmetric key with the site's public key. 6) Browser sends encrypted symmetric key to site. 7) Site decrypts symmetric key with its private key (the one associated with its public key certificate) 8) Site and browser encrypt and decrypt data using the privately shared symmetric key.

If I break the public key algorithm(s) used in SSL, I break all of that. But we think that's tough (as in NP hard).

If I break SSL itself (find flaws in negotiation, etc.) I might be able to break all of that. That's been done a few times (SSL v1.0 is garbage; v2.0 is borked; v3.0 a little broken; only TLS 1.2 is borkless, so far. As far as we know.

If I break the symmetric algorithm(s), then I can get at the data without breaking SSL itself. But we think that's tough, too. As far as we know.

If any of the software used in any of the above is borked, then usable attack vectors may be exist. Or not. We don't know until we find them.

It's a complex box of moving parts with many potential attack vectors, many potential vulnerabilities, etc.

Who really knows if the NSA might have found a multi-vector, multi-vulnerability attack that allows them to get at a lot of encrypted data without having broken all of any one of those things.

It's purest speculation until someone with a sufficient clearance and sufficient need-to-know decides to speak out, and even then it would remain unconfirmed.

nrmilstein2• 13 years ago

Can someone elaborate on how secure the underlying algorithms still are? Most of the NSA's "foiling" seems to be done via coercing corporations and side-channel attacks. Are TLS, AES, etc. still thought of as secure?

dannyobrien• 13 years ago

Bruce Schneier has seen the documents, and here's his advice: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-rema...

nrmilstein2• 13 years ago

Saw that too. Thanks!

chacham15• 13 years ago

Can someone boil this down and tell me the same thing from the technical side? I.e. what technical barriers have they managed to break (RSA, DSA, AES, etc.) ?

ternaryoperator2• 13 years ago

I think you have to assume the answer is: all.

donohoe• 13 years ago

So at this rate are there any encryption methods that we're pretty sure that the NSA cannot crack?

  By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has
  surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed 
  to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials 
  grew concerned about the spread of strong 
  encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy, 
  or P.G.P., designed by a programmer named Phil 
  Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought 
  back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which 
  would have effectively neutered digital 
  encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always 
  had the key.

Link to Paragraph w/ highlighting: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...

Should I bother to read up on PGP?

mindslight5• 13 years ago

I feel like these kinds of articles are meant to induce a sense of hopelessness regarding the ability to push back against the NSA.

If it turns out one way functions actually don't exist, I'll give in and learn to love big brother. Withstanding that, I'll continue considering communications freedom (and all that it implies) as our manifest right and view these types of breaks as implementation errors.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

You mean ability to push back _technologically_ against the NSA, right? This sort of article makes you think you can't beat the NSA tech, they will outsmart you.

What this sort of article does to me (unlike you, I make no claims to know what the article was 'meant' to do, other than report the news) is make it clear that we need to push back against the NSA _politically_ to win, make what they are doing illegal, change the gag order laws, etc. We aren't going to beat them technologically, but (for those of in the U.S.), it's theoretically a democracy, we can tell them to stop.

I've seen that argument made before, several times, in essays linked to on HN. It's a political problem, not a tech problem, that the NSA can force corporations to install back doors and give the NSA the keys.

mindslight5• 13 years ago

The problem is technological, as deficiencies in relied-upon communication technologies is what have allowed surveillance to scale from human intelligence on prioritized targets to dragnet scrutiny of everybody. No matter how much effort is required, "law enforcement" will always be snooping on some suspects - what we'd like to prevent is an institutionalized fishing expedition.

You're signing up for a losing game. The myth of Democracy (tm) is another layer of control over individuals.

1. Most people will never have a problem with what the NSA is doing. They support the NSA's goals (tautology, since as you've mentioned, it is responsible to the majority), and if its methods end up causing harm to enough people, they will simply be adjusted to reduce aggregate harm (not to rule out any possible harm). The feedback loop of democracy works on specific actualities, not hypothetical corner cases.

2. The most memetically fit ideas are the simplest ones that elicit the strongest feelings (see: bikeshedding). Outrage peddlers swamp the political reception bandwidth with lowest common denominator controversy - usually judgments on other's lifestyles.

3. Even if there is a widespread preference to reduce the scope of the NSA, the people simply do not have the transmit bandwidth to make this preference clearly known. And they are easily led into squandering their input on the aforementioned manufactured controversy.

4. Elected figures don't actually run the government, the entrenched bureaucracy does at an imperceptible glacial pace. The elected figures run interference by making the majority believe they voted for this shit.

abeinstein• 13 years ago

So, NSA has solved P vs NP and they're just not telling us?

lurkinggrue2• 13 years ago

What they have is a bunch of telepaths in tanks that can see dimly into the future and they recover the keys.

MattJ100• 13 years ago

Snowden claimed a while back that encryption itself was not broken by the NSA, but that the endpoint security usually was (no surprise there): http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-...

untog2• 13 years ago

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in.

And we can't even be that angry at the (e.g.) Microsoft execs that authorise the back doors- they potentially face jail time if they resist NSA requests. All the while presumably not able to talk about the requests publicly.

EDIT: and the really fun part - did you know the former head of the NSA serves on the board of directors for Motorola Solutions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)

teleclimber• 13 years ago

That's the quote that jumped out at me too. The solution for those who want to stay out of NSA's reach is to use your own hardware, and use open source software (where it's hard to put a backdoor without being discovered) and strong encryption.

electic2• 13 years ago

Remember when Microsoft would trash Linux because it was open source and "not secure." Well, this settles it. Using your own hardware and open source software helps but someone determined will still get in...

gaius5• 13 years ago

That's a false sense of security. You can inspect every line of code in SSL but unless you are a world-class cryptographer yourself, how will you spot a backdoor in the algorithm?

justincormack• 13 years ago

Plus (form the Guardian article) there are covert agents in all the companies, presumably lifting all the certs, which may well be unauthorised, but you can't prosecute.

Do you know who your covert agents are?

ganeumann2• 13 years ago

Why couldn't you prosecute, if you found out? I assume theft is still theft, even if done by a government employee.

philfreo• 13 years ago

That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in.

It's not like they've just gotten secret keys. They've specifically gotten chip manufacturers to add backdoors to hardware, as well as significantly influenced actual cryptography standards themselves:

"The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”
“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

cldr• 13 years ago

I don't understand that part of the article, what algorithm standard was it? AES?

magicalist2• 13 years ago

Presumably that's DRBGs[1]? Does anyone actually use them in that form?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

masonhensley• 13 years ago

I'm guessing this is what tripped up Lavabit. Mr. Levison probably didn't have the back doors and balked at being complicit once he came onto the NSA's radar.

From the article: "Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read."

Also: “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” - Snowden

I would assume that because Snowden used Lavabit & they shut down that the NSA took issue with how secure Lavabit actually was.

Zariel• 13 years ago

Isn't this the fact that NSA has access to the internet companies private key for the SSL certificate? There by giving them the tools to decrypt the initial TLS handshake and then from there you can get the symmetric key and decrypt the rest? Or is there more to it, reading the article I didn't see any hard proof of this.

conorh• 13 years ago

It always seemed likely to me that governments can generate fake trusted certs for browser TLS traffic and then man in the middle the traffic, but what are the likely modes of attack otherwise? I don't really see what they are from this article - do they have a database of keys they have acquired nefariously?

jashkenas• 13 years ago

With a byline from our very own "thejefflarson" (on HN). That's a lovely thing to see.

induscreep• 13 years ago

I am not really concerned about this encryption business...but have they managed to solve P=NP in the process of cracking crypto algos??

jonknee5• 13 years ago

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted.

I wonder which computer viruses belong to the NSA.

wvenable• 13 years ago

Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, Symbian, and any Linux distribution you haven't culled together and compiled yourself.

__david__• 13 years ago

...any Linux distribution you haven't culled together and compiled yourself.

And maybe even ones you have compiled yourself "from scratch":

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

danso• 13 years ago

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization, by The Guardian, which has published its own article. They focus primarily on GCHQ but include thousands either from or about the N.S.A.

Is this the first time we've seen a 5-digit number to describe the number of documents Snowden has? Of course, these are just the ones used for this story...

jlgaddis5• 13 years ago

I noticed that number as well and don't recall seeing it before, but I do seem to recall reading something about "multiple laptops" of Snowden's. Obviously, one can store a helluva lot of documents on three or four laptops.

lurkinggrue2• 13 years ago

Best to only use Open Source encryption software.

outside1234• 13 years ago

yeah, cuz there's no way the NSA could contribute code to that too.

kamjam3• 13 years ago

It might be time for the community to do some thorough code audits on stuff like this... :(

eCa• 13 years ago

Search this thread for "Theo de Raadt" and read the link...

quotemstr• 13 years ago

What's truly frightening is this line from the Guardian's article on the topic:

The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".

What does that even mean? That statement is at the same time paranoid, arrogant, and subtly threatening. It's as if to say that without the ability to decrypt interesting traffic, the NSA would be forced to take stronger measures to curtail internet traffic.

ganeumann2• 13 years ago

That was what caught my eye also. It seems to imply that if they can't read our Internet traffic then they'll have to take the US off the Internet. That's a pretty drastic threat.

ihsw2• 13 years ago

It means there are two choices for America's participation in the global internet: decryption capabilities or America's Great Firewall.

The statement implies that in the absence of "strong decryption programs" then there would be only restricted access to and use of cyberspace. I'm sure the intelligence leadership in the US Government look at China's Great Firewall with both trepidation and admiration.

wiredfool• 13 years ago

It makes sense if "the US" = "the NSA". Stuff's been encrypted, for the NSA to continue to have access, they've gotta break it.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

I think the key to understanding this is to remember that it was written by the NSA for the understanding of the NSA, or other highly authorized eyeballs in the government.

In many government documents, use of the name "U.S." is shorthand for the U.S. national government, not the entirety of the nation. Sometimes it is even shorthand for the particular agency that authored the document (since, in theory, they represent and act on behalf of the entire nation).

So what this internal NSA document most likely means by "unrestricted access and use" is the NSA's unrestricted access to, and use of, whatever data they want.

Think of it like a budget justification (since that is the purpose of at least half of all internal government reports). "You need to keep spending a lot of money on this program if you want us to keep getting all that data you like so much."

toyg2• 13 years ago

Look at what's happening in the UK, in Australia, in France, in Italy, in Spain... the Chinese model is winning hearts and minds of politicians everywhere, and how could it not? If you're into politics, you likely want to reach a Platonic ideal of harmonic society, where nobody is offended, nobody is threatened, and all laws are perfectly respected and enacted. You can't have that on a fully-open network. How can you keep your people from enduring child porn and Islamic propaganda, without censorship?

So most states are slowly moving towards implementing their own little firewalls. The only notable absence? The US. Despite occasional campaigns from religious nutters of various sizes and shapes and continuous pressures from commercial telcos, subsequent US administrations repeatedly affirmed that fundamental Net freedoms would not be curtailed.

This document states that such a position is not coming from idealism or even commercial convenience: it's a way to persuade the rest of the world to do business over networks and protocols that the NSA can tap at will. Should this capability be forcefully contained, there wouldn't be a political incentive to keep the Net flowing freely through US routers.

It's a perfectly reasonable and plausible position, and that's why it's so terrifying.

GabrielF00• 13 years ago

Completely off-base. The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards free speech than Europe. Consider blasphemy laws in the UK, which were only abolished in 2008 but would never have been constitutional in the US. Consider laws against Holocaust denial or displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying a swastika. In the United States, the courts (in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie) allowed a Nazi group to march through a neighborhood populated largely by Jewish Holocaust survivors. None of these have to do with controlling networks. They have to do with the first amendment and with both jurisprudence and attitudes towards freedom of speech that are different in the US than in many other countries.

Scramblejams• 13 years ago

Single page link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...

smutticus2• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2

As someone who has been following the NSA and government monitoring of online activity for close to 15 years the Snowden leaks just keep taking the wind out of me. It's like everything that we thought might be going on was actually going on. When Theo de Raadt wrote the above mail I, like many at the time, assumed it was tinfoil hat territory. I was clearly wrong.

m0nastic5• 13 years ago

In that particular instance you weren't wrong[1], but that's the problem when stories like this come out, is that it makes it much harder to know what's a crazy conspiracy theory and what's real.

[1] Those claims made by Greg are completely untrue. I ran the professional services group for that company and will happily attest to whomever asks that at no time did we insert a backdoor (or anything that could even be construed as such) into IPSEC.

unimpressive• 13 years ago

Those claims made by Greg are completely untrue. I ran the professional services group for that company and will happily attest to whomever asks that at no time did we insert a backdoor (or anything that could even be construed as such) into IPSEC.

Somehow I doubt if you did that you could tell us. You might even have to lie to be able to comment on that letter at all.

MarcusBrutus• 13 years ago

The Allies had broken most of the Nazi codes during WWII but they still withheld information from commanders unless the information concerned an absolutely strategic battlefield that hang on the balance. Better suffer a few dead or some minor setbacks than let the Germans grow suspicious and start doubting their cryptography. Morale of the story: unless you're the next Osama or Showden or some major narco-trafficker it doesn't apply to you.

vkou• 13 years ago

Or the next MLK...

tc• 13 years ago

This is really damaging.

Not only will this cause other countries to put up barriers against US (and UK) services and products, it's going to affect uptake of standards developed here.

On the lighter side, a treasure hunt was just announced. Can you find one of these vulnerabilities, or evidence of the NSA having attacked a particular system to steal keys?

----

[Edit 1] Some speculation:

By careful hardware design -- and lots of it -- the NSA may be able to find keys large enough that we would be mildly surprised but not shocked. It's not well known that searching for many keys in parallel amortizes well -- it's much cheaper than finding all the keys individually. DJB has a great paper about this:

http://cr.yp.to/snuffle/bruteforce-20050425.pdf

If I were looking for subverted hardware, I'd be really interested in reverse engineering Ethernet chips and BMCs. The CPU would be an obvious choice as well -- could there be some sequence of instructions that enables privilege escalation?

On protocols, the best sort of vulnerability for the NSA would be the kind that is still somewhat difficult and expensive to exploit. They want the security lowered just far enough that they can get the plaintext, but not so far that our adversaries can.

There is some history with not taking timing attacks seriously enough. Perhaps careful timing observation, which the NSA is well positioned to do, could give more of an edge than we suspect. Or perhaps you could push vendors to make their products susceptible to this kind of attack, secure in the belief that it may be difficult for others to detect.

[Edit 2]

I gave a talk that discussed what I think we as engineers should do here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7oK59DZwR4#t=1m46s

And Phil Zimmermann and I discussed a number of these issues in a Q&A session:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42i8zCEizI#t=49m55s

kamjam3• 13 years ago

Imagine this is proved in France, this would add some weight to the investigation and case against the US, esp if they can prove personal encryptyed information was stolen!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/28/us-usa-security-fr...

lambda12• 13 years ago

One of the vulnerabilities was already discovered by researchers in 2007: http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

At the time, it wasn't clear if this was a deliberate backdoor or an accident, but it was proven that there there was a possibility that there was a secret key that would allow someone to predict future values of a pseudo random number generator based on previous values. Now it looks pretty clear that it was a deliberate backdoor.

This really reduces trust in US based cryptographic standards. And US based cryptographic hardware, as they mention in the article that they convinced hardware manufacturers to insert backdoors for hardware shipped overseas.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

This is almost definitely not "one of the vulnerabilities" implicated in the story today, because nobody uses CSPRNGs based on Elliptic Curve.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

I would not be at all surprised to learn that the major advance these disclosures refer to is an on-demand RSA-1024 factoring capability. RSA-1024 is already known to be unsafe (Eran Tromer estimates a 7 figure cost for a dedicated hardware cracker, which is approximately the threshold DES was at in the late '90s, when nobody believed DES was secure). On-demand offline RSA-1024 attacks would have major implications, would be a huge advance in the state of the art, but also seems feasible given an effectively unlimited budget.

TheCondor• 13 years ago

That makes sense. I think it unlikely they've discovered an actual break through. They do have their own fab, how many chips do you need to build to Mae that worthwhile? It's the US government after all, a machine with 10million specialized RSA chips doesn't seem impossibly difficult, just expensive.

mrb6• 13 years ago

I think we know very well which encryption has been foiled by the NSA. This is not speculation, but quasi-certainty: 1024-bit RSA.

- Crytographers all acknowledge 1024-bit RSA is dead [1].

- Attack cost 10 years ago was estimated to be a few million USD to build a device able to crack a 1024-bit key every 12 months [2].

- "Much of" the "secure" HTTPS websites use such weak key sizes [3].

- NSA had a budget of 10.8 billion USD in 2013.

Drawing a conclusion is not very hard.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/05/researchers-307... [2] http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/twirl/ [3] https://www.eff.org/pages/howto-using-ssl-observatory-cloud

leokun5• 13 years ago

Some popular browsers still do not support newer versions. We tried turning this on with a newer, more secure key and ended up having downtime for some customers.

aliston• 13 years ago

The article you linked to in [1] doesn't explicitly say that generalized 1024-bit RSA is dead. They found a way to exploit a special case key (Mersenne number keys). Searching around the internet, I found a bunch of articles about supposed cracks, but they all involved additional sources of information. I'm not doubting that the NSA has found ways to crack all sorts of crypto, but is there really a known way to break 1024-bit RSA without other special qualifiers?

Achshar3• 13 years ago

I am confused. When I see HN or facebook certs they show 128 bit encryption in the browser box. 128 bit seems pretty low.

masswerk• 13 years ago

Considering http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/ I wouldn't bet on "deep encryption" either ...

grecy• 13 years ago

but not so far that our adversaries can.

Please clarify what you mean by "our".

Please clarify what you mean by "adversaries".

hextalib• 13 years ago

Come now, we know enough about the NSA at this point to know that

our, adversaries = America, !America

right?

unreal372• 13 years ago

In this context, an adversary is any encrypted data they want to be able to decrypt. Anything.

eli_gottlieb• 13 years ago

Adversary in security means anyone you don't want reading your data.

hershel• 13 years ago

In this pdf[1] , they discuss security issues in intel chips.They mention strange responses from intel. Also it's possible, but very hard to exploit those issues , which is optimal in this case.

1[]http://pavlinux.ru/jr/Software_Attacks_on_Intel_VT-d.pdf

voltagex_3• 13 years ago

Forgive me if I don't open a PDF from a .ru domain. (and yes, I know how silly that response is)

pedrocr3• 13 years ago

the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of American Civil War battles. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Spying on your own citizens codenamed as civil war. How nice.

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Once again, the people spying on everyone suck at keeping their own secrets. How many others have taken the information with them and sold it off instead of leaking it?

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped,

If you're a non-US company how can you keep trusting US IT vendors? I wouldn't want to be one of these companies' reps at Airbus for example.

squozzer• 13 years ago

What's in a name? Perhaps your intended targets. Can't wait to see Project Auschwitz.

asploder• 13 years ago

Humorously, the United States Army lost both Battles of Bull Run to the Confederates.

brown9-22• 13 years ago

Spying on your own citizens codenamed as civil war. How nice.

Nowhere in the article does it state that these methods can be used against US persons separate from other protections against surveillance on US persons, nor does it give the impression that this is special to US persons:

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant.

Let's keep in mind the fact that an intelligence agency is built to gather intelligence on other governments/organizations and that often involves breaking other jurisdiction's rules.

pedrocr3• 13 years ago

the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant

The previous leaks show these rules to not be particularly effective. For me and most of the world that distinction is irrelevant anyway. The position of the US government is that it can order its tech companies, with whom I have contractual/financial relationships to give them all my data with no warrant.

sshconnection• 13 years ago

You must have been living under a rock for the past few months. Welcome to September, where we now know that to not be the case.

betterunix9• 13 years ago

"The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant."

Rules which are enforced internally, with an inspector general chosen by the same executive branch that commands the NSA's leadership. Yes, we can really rely on these rules when push comes to shove.

solnyshok2• 13 years ago

Knowing what kind of encryption NSA uses internally, can tell all about what is compromised and what's still secure.

jlgaddis5• 13 years ago

Every publicly known cipher is compromised then? The ciphers that the NSA primarily uses (internally) are classified.

solnyshok2• 13 years ago

wouldn't it be logical for them to use ciphers that they do not know how to compromise yet?

albertsun• 13 years ago

"In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times."

Wow.... this really puts all the furor over Huawei contracts in the US in context.

wyck• 13 years ago

I will just leave this here:

http://www.csoonline.com/article/707542/china-not-to-blame-f...

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/133773-rakshasa-the-har...

pja3• 13 years ago

All that furore over Huawei contracts in the US was just projection wasn't it? You're might be more secure buying your network kit from Huawei than from a US manufacturer.

theintern• 13 years ago

Sounds like it was justified really, the NSA know since they've done similar things themselves that it's possible, so it's not a stretch to assume China is doing the same thing.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

You can't have read Applied Cryptography from the mid-90s and not understand this to have been NSA's M.O. from the jump. Bruce Scheier, who was quoted in the Guardian piece about the same story, is America's foremost popularizer of the notion of NSA as crypto's global passive adversary. People who build real cryptosystems have never, ever been allowed to rely on the goodwill of the NSA not to cryptanalyze their systems.

Entire crypto schemes, from the RIPEMD hash to the specific parameter generation mechanism in DSA, are premised on the idea that USG-sponsored crypto concepts aren't inherently trustworthy. Similarly, all of Applied Cryptography was premised on the idea that NSA was decades ahead of commercial and academic crypto.

Of the revelations about NSA, this has to be the least revelatory (it's up/down there with the "revelation" that NSA employs teams of people whose job it is to break into Windows computers); it essentially restates something we were already supposed to have taken for granted.

That's not to say this isn't a fascinating story. It is; just keep it in context. Things to remember:

* You really want to know whether NSA is directly attacking cryptographic primitives or whether they're subverting endpoints. I think if you talk to cryptographers, you'll get a slight bias towards the belief that it's the latter: that there are implementation weaknesses at play here more than fundamental breaks in crypto.

* You want to keep in mind that breaks in cryptosystems represent new knowledge, and that the enterprise of breaking cryptosystems is an issue distinct from the public policy concern of where NSA is allowed to deploy those breaks.

* Bear in mind that in the legacy TLS security model, before things like pinning and TACK, NSA would only require a viable attack on a small subset of CAs to gain (along with pervasive network taps) massive capabilities. The payoff for these kinds of capabilities is radically degraded by the anti-surveillance mechanisms of modern browsers like Chrome, which is something you probably want to be thanking people like Adam Langley, Trevor Perrin, and Moxie Marlinspike for pushing so hard to implement.

guelo• 13 years ago

That security systems are designed in the most paranoid fashion possible doesn't tell you anything about the real nature of the threat. Schneier's book doesn't tell you that the NSA has been strong arming corporations into giving up their private keys and into installing backdoors on chips.

In fact Schneier himself is outraged to the point that he seems to be calling for a redesign of basic Internet protocols and governance in his article today, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/governm...

tptacek18• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'm a little baffled by Schneier's reaction to this. The revelation is advanced cryptanalytic capabilities at NSA, which is literally an article of faith with Schneier. Why is he freaking out about this when he didn't instead freak out about wholesale call record database dumps or AT&T fiber taps?

alasdair_3• 13 years ago

Can you expand a bit on chrome's anti-surveilance capabilities?

tptacek18• 13 years ago

They pin certificates, so that a CA compromise that would enable MITM attack by the global passive adversary would be detectable (and in fact that mechanism has already been used to detect CA compromises.)

wonderzombie• 13 years ago

Probably these:

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/11/22/forwardsecret.html

mpyne8• 13 years ago

It was these types of capabilities that revealed Iran (IIRC) managed to break DigiCert to issue a GMail certificate a year or two ago to surveil Iranians via MITM.

gamble4• 13 years ago

It may be widely believe in cryptography circles, but this release wipes away the plausible deniability that governments and American corporations have always depended on. Just last week, the German government was pooh-pooh'ing claims that Windows and TPM chips had backdoors inserted by the NSA.[1] These documents all but confirm it.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/german-government-refutes-windows-backd...

tptacek18• 13 years ago

What? Which documents confirm backdoors in TPM chips?

betterunix9• 13 years ago

What amazes and saddens me about this, though, is that I was one of the people who thought that we could draw a line -- the NSA was obviously going to keep its cryptanalysis techniques secret, they probably listened to everything, but the idea that they were actively sabotaging cryptosystems just seemed like to far-fetched a conspiracy theory. Half their mission is to protect US communications from foreigners, and backdoors are the most obvious way to not achieve that goal.

Yet here we have proof that the NSA is truly in the business of sabotaging cryptosystems that are in general use. Those systems protect US interests as much as foreign interests, and now they are not trustworthy. Now I am left wondering -- PGP, for example, deviates from theoretical constructions of non-malleable encryption; might that have been the NSA's doing? What about the problems in various versions of TLS? Now it is hard to say what is an honest mistake and what is a deliberate effort to undermine computer security.

We are now past the point of not blaming on malice what we can attribute to stupidity, because we have evidence that there is actual malice on a grand scale. It is a truly sad day for this world...

tptacek18• 13 years ago

No, that's not NSA's doing. PGP predates the theoretical constructions you're referring to. Bellare/Namprempre was something like 5 years after the first "modern" PGP (IIRC the original PGP used a terribly broken cipher of Zimmerman's own design). Also, malleability is not a particularly lucrative capability for NSA to have, even if you want to assume that the integrity mechanisms in PGP are broken.

lukifer• 13 years ago

Crypto noob here: Is it feasible to subvert "unknown unknown" vulneraties by applying multiple layers of different forms of encryption? While a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, it intuitively seems like encrypted data is as strong as its strongest link.

mhax• 13 years ago

While taking for granted the NSA's M.O. (also having read Applied Cryptography some years ago) this leak somehow hits harder than the rest.

Yes, we had to assume it was happening and we'd have been foolish not to. But to have it laid out in no uncertain terms, is somehow quite devastating.

Daniel_Newby2• 13 years ago

I agree that they are probably subverting endpoints. Nobody has mentioned it yet, but I suspect that differential power analysis plays a big role. The published attacks using DPA have been both devastating and trivial.

The allegations of widespread hardware backdoors are ludicrous. The backdoors would eventually become public, requiring the replacement of billions of dollars worth of equipment, and the several times that cost in audits. Only a spymaster with a suicidal death wish would chain his career to that. More likely is that people are misinterpreting backdoors in a few chosen endpoints, which we can take as standard operating procedure.

harshreality2• 13 years ago

What do you think the likelihood is of NSA doing (active) SSL MITM attacks using NSL'd CA keys?

Users running extensions that use things like EFF's SSL Observatory (SSL Everywhere has an option to report to that) will cause those NSA-generated certs to show up, and someone will get suspicious eventually. The only reports I've seen recently on that front were things like middle eastern users sending in samples of MITM certs. I'm not saying the NSA can't do it, but what evidence is there that the NSA has done MITM on SSL traffic? For all we know, couldn't the MITM ssl certs in the mideast be an NSA false flag op?

tytso3• 13 years ago

I am so glad I resisted pressure from engineers working at Intel to let /dev/random in Linux rely blindly on the output of the RDRAND instructure. Relying solely on an implementation sealed inside a chip and which is impossible to audit is a BAD idea. Quoting from the article...

"By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors..."

magicalist2• 13 years ago

Was that really a seriously considered plan? I don't see how that would ever be a suitable /dev/random replacement. Obviously it works for /dev/urandom, but it should be added to the entropy pool for /dev/random at most.

lambda12• 13 years ago

Matt Mackall, the former maintainer of /dev/random, actually stepped down over this issue, because Linus overrode Matt and applied Intel's patch that used their hardware random number generator directly:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.cryptography.r...

It's worth noting that the maintainer of record (me) for the Linux RNG quit the project about two years ago precisely because Linus decided to include a patch from Intel to allow their unauditable RdRand to bypass the entropy pool over my strenuous objections.
From a quick skim of current sources, much of that has recently been rolled back (/dev/random, notably) but kernel-internal entropy users like sequence numbers and address-space randomization appear to still be exposed to raw RdRand output.

Ted Ts'o later reverted this, separating out Intel's hardware random number generation into a separate function that could be used to seed the entropy pool but wouldn't be trusted directly as the main kernel source of random numbers:

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...

tytso3• 13 years ago

Not only did it happen before, just TODAY I had to fight back an attempt by a Red Hat engineer who wanted to add a configuration option which would once again allow RDRAND to be used directly, bypassing the entropy pool: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/5/212

lambda12• 13 years ago

Thank you for that, and I hope that the people who keep arguing "if you can't trust your hardware, you can't trust anything, so we may as well just blindly trust the hardware" keep this in mind.

A bug deliberately introduced in an AES instruction, or in general purpose instructions that detects crypto operations and leaks information somehow, is much, much harder to implement and hide than a pseudo-random number generator that passes all tests that you apply to it, but produces predictable output for someone who knows some secret key.

josephlord• 13 years ago

TLS/SSL has a whole bunch of options that are negotiated between client and server to find one that they can both accept. I speculate that some of these may be badly broken by the NSA but the exact ones haven't been revealed so we don't know which ones need taking off the table.

Is there anything unusual about the cipher options offered by NSA/GCHQ servers? Or any recent changes at The NYTimes or Guardian's servers.

bhauer• 13 years ago

Out of humor and a bit of worry, I had previously posed a conspiracy theory that the NSA/etc. had undermined (coerced, compromised, whatever) the Internet's certificate authorities. I no longer am comfortable dismissing it as silly humor. I worry that such a theory has about equal parts merit as not.

I now want viable open source web-of-trust encryption for the web as soon as possible.

ihsw2• 13 years ago

The worrying part is the "etc" part of your sentence, namely that all federal agencies in the US Government now have unrestricted access to encrypted communications. The DEA and the IRS are only the tip of the iceberg.

If one government agency has your data then the rest of them do too.

Filligree6• 13 years ago

Oh, don't forget other governments. If the NSA can do it, China and Russia certainly can too.

wildster• 13 years ago

It would be so damaging for Intel or AMD if a credible leak revealed they had backdoors built in, is it this really conceivable?

ianstallings• 13 years ago

I really wish these guys would understand how they're impacting Internet-based commerce. What good is controlling the Internet if people stop using it because of privacy concerns? They seem completely unconcerned about how IT drives the US economy and how a lack of confidence in that sector leads to bad things.

lelf• 13 years ago

One-page http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...

16s3• 13 years ago

Some organizations have IT security departments that attempt to foil encryption already. They use devices to terminate SSL before it leaves their network and forge certs back to clients and basically act as a MITM for the clients making the TLS/SSL request. They do this to inspect the traffic before it leaves the network.

I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, many organizations across all industry sectors will drop/reject encrypted packets (SSL, SSH, SFTP, etc) that they cannot decrypt. And the reason they'll give is that it makes them more secure.

The concern I have (as a security technologist) is that most people who use encryption are not bad, however everyone is punished and every packet must now be inspected because a few people use encryption to do bad things. So one day soon, I'm afraid that anyone who uses encryption will be suspect simply because they do and the stronger the encryption, then the more suspect they'll be.

Will it become illegal to do encryption research or use OpenPGP unless you agree to escrow your private key or will everyone be forced to use very weak ciphers? In today's climate (encryption is evil), I see all of these things as very real possibilities.

wiml3• 13 years ago

Cisco firewalls, by default, perform a MITM protocol downgrade attack on the SMTP sessions they see. They modify the SMTP setup to prevent the endpoints from negotiating STARTTLS and cause them to fall back to cleartext communication. Has been true for years.

You can turn it off... but how many admins do? If you want an example of behavior which is completely plausibly-deniable, but which immensely reduces internet security, this is a good one.

croddin• 13 years ago

This thread reminds me of an xkcd comic which is a good description of what might be happening: http://xkcd.com/538/

lambda12• 13 years ago

A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

This paragraph interests me the most.

For one, it's clear that their goal is opportunistic decryption; that is, decrypting everything and being able to search through it, rather than targeting known endpoints. This is an important point that a lot of people miss when debating cryptography. While it's fairly likely that the government can find ways to access any communication they want in a targeted manner, as they have so many means to do so (hacking the endpoints, physically breaking in and performing an evil maid attack, etc), widespread encryption is generally good enough to prevent opportunistic data gathering.

The other point I note is that they only mention "web chats and phone calls" in their breakthrough. It doesn't sound like the breakthrough is something that works well for arbitrary SSL connections. The main link I can see between web chats and phone calls is that they are long lived connections, with bursty traffic (HTTP or email protocols, on the other hand, tend to stream a lot of data at once, and then the connection is closed). I'm wondering if there's some kind of traffic or timing analysis vulnerability that they've discovered.

Also interesting is this quote from the Guardian article:

To help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for "human intelligence" refers to information gleaned directly from sources or undercover agents. This GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, "responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry."

Various technology companies have been adamant in maintaining that they haven't been been giving the NSA direct access to their data. However, with HUMINT programs like this, you always have to wonder if the NSA has hired anyone within such companies to put backdoors into their systems, without authorization by the company. Obviously, they'd have to be subtle about it (it's hard to install new gigabit fiber pipes to siphon off the data without anyone noticing), but just setting up a way for the NSA to covertly run queries, disguised as some other type of job that would normally run on the system, would probably not be too hard to do.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

As Snowden showed you need only one rogue admin most of the times to get what you want

malandrew• 13 years ago

    (it's hard to install new gigabit fiber pipes to siphon
    off the data without anyone noticing)

If you have access to manufacturers that can put in back doors for you, I reckon you don't even need your mole to install stuff for you. Instead you just ask your mole to inform you want is going to be installed and then make sure that the company gets backdoored systems when hardware is installed/upgraded/replaced.

I'm wondering is datacenter monitoring utilities like the stuff Boundary[0] is working on could be used to identify anomalies in how network hardware is behaving versus how it should be behaving. I know that in my conversations with cliff, they are trying to get their monitoring solution to the point where they can visualize "the circulatory system" of a data system with the goal of spotting things that don't look quite right.

[0] http://boundary.com/

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

Up until very recently, the received wisdom was: the crypto wars are over, we fought the law and the law gave up, the NSA has quit trying to crack encryption, they have decided the USA is best strengthened by having a reliable internet which business rival nations can't just read like the morning's news. The NSA knows the problems in crypto and their suggestions make it stronger against attacks we don't know. Trust the NSA.

Would that it were true! It would make sense. This makes no damn sense. Just recently I would have ruled out huge conspiracies as implausible because they inevitably leak (roll save against ethics how many times?). The joke's on me, folks. The NSA has no sense. And the conspiracy leaked.

So now every single decision that was taken with help from the NSA (SELinux, TLS, elliptic curves, etc) needs unpicking and running by a cryptographer who isn't a shill. What a damn drag. And meanwhile, the aftershocks will run for years trashing trust in the networked economy.

Fuckin' brilliant, NSA. You screwed the pooch. You accidentally the whole internet.

cbr2• 13 years ago

    So now every single decision that was taken with help
    from the NSA (SELinux, TLS, elliptic curves, etc) needs
    unpicking and running by a cryptographer who isn't a
    shill.

Cryptographers have already been looking very carefully at everything that comes out of the NSA. Lots of security researchers, in and out of the US, would love to find NSA-introduced flaws.

mpyne8• 13 years ago

It would even be ironic if people's aversion to things like SELinux caused them to use software which is even less secure, and correspondingly easier for NSA to break. They know the long game too...

D_Alex• 13 years ago

they inevitably leak (roll save against ethics how many times?)

Haha, nicely put. Note too that sooo many "roll save against temptation" must happen to avoid abuses of the NSA capabilities.

caf2• 13 years ago

Note that SELinux isn't crypto - it's code to implement mandatory access control, which is just regular bitbashing that any software engineer is completely qualified to audit.

eggoa• 13 years ago

So the Feds mandate data security, e.g. HIPAA, and then actively subvert our ability to achieve that security.

w_t_payne2• 13 years ago

Wow .... so SSH is broken? Wow ....

wfunction2• 13 years ago

I've take a look at half the article so far and still can't find a single specific example of a "backdoor".

The entire thing seems hand-wavy.

pdonis• 13 years ago

As is usually the case with an article in the mainstream media, the most interesting part is what isn't in it. If much Internet traffic is vulnerable to the NSA (and to the UK's GCHQ), doesn't that imply that much Internet traffic is also vulnerable to other governments? Such as, oh, say, China and Russia?

csense2• 13 years ago

In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, [Lavabit] surrendered

I disagree with this characterization. Surrendering to the NSA would be Google/Facebook/Microsoft's approach of unconditional cooperation. Lavabit's refusal to work with the NSA -- even though apparently the only alternative was shutting down their business or going to jail -- is more along the lines of a scorched earth retreat (destroying your own stuff when you can't hold the line).

jjoe• 13 years ago

This doesn't make sense. It can't be. Why would cryptography be subject to export regulations then? If we follow this logic, you would think export barriers would have been brought down decades ago and use of NSA cryptography highly encouraged worldwide.

peterhunt• 13 years ago

Where are the original documents (primary sources)?

codex• 13 years ago

I wonder if RHEL and Ubuntu distros have NSA/FBI root kit backdoors in their kernel binaries and/or subscription services.

SEMW• 13 years ago

You think no-one's tried recreating various distros' binaries from their published source, to check they're the same? E.g. Jos van den Oever did that for Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE here[1].

Which isn't to say that backdoors inserted into the binary that aren't in the published source are impossible, only that they need something more subtle than the crude/easily-detectable 'merge backdoor, compile, ship'. Something like a Ken Thompson 'Trusting Trust'[2]-style attack. (Though there are ways of at least having a good chance of detecting even those - see [3]).

(More likely, IMHO, are just deliberately-introduced, plausibly-deniable bugs in the source - think [4]. Yeah, they might be found & reported by an outsider reviewing the source, in which case you thank them, fix it, and introduce another couple somewhere else next week).

[1] http://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/19/really-source-code-software

[2] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

[3] http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/

[4] http://underhanded.xcott.com/

16s3• 13 years ago

If we are going to vilify encryption, then we should just stop teaching math. That's all encryption is.

Cyranix• 13 years ago

That is a really weird conclusion to draw from this article. I don't know who you think is "vilifying" encryption as an application of mathematics.

csense2• 13 years ago

Speaking as an American, it's not a problem that the capability to break encryption exists and the NSA has it. It really does make national security stronger if your intelligence people can read enemy communications.

The problem is that the NSA apparently used those capabilities on basically everyone, millions of innocent Americans whose activities should be of no interest to intelligence agencies, not just the handful of genuine spooks and terrorists our intelligence agencies are supposed to protect us from. (To international people: Cosmically speaking, you're not less important than we are, but the NSA's first responsibility is to protect and serve the USA, so them spying on innocent Americans is at least as bad as them spying on innocent foreigners.)

And it has been shown that the NSA provided information to ordinary criminal investigations with no links to terrorism or foreign intelligence, having police say "it's a lucky traffic stop," where the government actually knew the drugs were in that car ahead of time due to a decrypted phone call. This makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment because, when prosecutors/police lie to the courts about the origin of evidence, the courts cannot properly answer the question of whether their methods of gathering evidence violate the defendant's Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In short, this is coming out -- which, as the article said, will weaken those capabilities -- because the NSA went too far outside their mission scope. If they hadn't done those two things, I'd be willing to bet Snowden wouldn't have leaked this data.

7952• 13 years ago

A political counter-argument is that this program may represent terrible value for money in the long run. If we are in a security arms race this money neither buys weapons or a defence that can't be overcome by opponents simply buying better weapons and defences.

The NSA could have made more of an effort to harden American business and infrastructure to attack. They could have spent the money on developing intelligence sources who actually work for opponents instead of US telcos. They could have fixed zero day exploits.

We are rapidly approach a time where oponents will be able to attack completely annonymously. American infrastructure or buisness could be damanaged and know one ever know who or why. If that happens cold war tactics will seem hopelessly naive.

brown9-22• 13 years ago

The most fascinating part of this article to me is this part, which proves that even a super-secure intelligence agency can still have very weak links that can be penetrated:

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Who knows what other documents other internal hackers could have stolen?

vasilipupkin• 13 years ago

I am saddened by how out of control this is

junto• 13 years ago

There is an old saying that states that a jealous husband or wife can't be trusted. They don't trust you because they are, have, or are thinking about fucking someone else.

When the combined '5 eyes' come out and ban Lenovo / Huawei from being used on any of their secure networks, because of fears of back doors [1], one has to imagine that the same is true of themselves.

The hardware is most likely backdoored as well as firmware, the OS and installed software. I would not trust anything, even open source, because to be perfectly honest, there a very few people who really are smart enough to understand the in depth cryptographic requirements. If there are people, then they probably already work for the NSA or GCHQ.

If you want to plan a terrorist attack or become a politician or business leader who does not want to be blackmailed, don't do anything on the internet apart from share pictures of cute cats.

My advice to any terrorists is to go dark. Speak in private. Write it down pass the note and then burn it. Use old methods like book ciphers. Touch and electronic device and they have you.

Legal note: Of course I'm not advocating 'advising' terrorists, well only the good ones, you know those ones that we call 'freedom fighters'. The ones western governments like to back when it suits their purposes.

[1] http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/33679/lenovo-compu...

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

From the other article on the same subject:

"Among the specific accomplishments for 2013, the NSA expects the program to obtain access to "data flowing through a hub for a major communications provider" and to a "major internet peer-to-peer voice and text communications system". "

That second one is hard to read other than 'skype'.

oceanstone• 13 years ago

The NSA promises to make our country stronger, then they purposefully weaken it. Then they name the programs after battles in the Civil War.

pyaniv• 13 years ago

Just shame on the rest of countries around the world to let the USA control and abuse the internet and all relevant technologies. Every major chip, OS and software is created in the USA. If people elsewhere lack the brains and innovation of USA, they should accept the consequences. Of course, I'm part of the dumb ass rest of the world.

consonants• 13 years ago

I want to take a step away from the personal privacy violations here, and approach from an angle that (unfortunately) would motive those with money to lobby against this: your business secrets are out there being collected and reviewed by an organization composed of the smartest and most secretive people in our country.

There really should be no doubt at all that there is corporate espionage and insider trading going on. On one hand, if the NSA approached this with giving helpful 'heads up' when a US-based multinational's overseas factory might be planning to strike, or provide their foreign competitors' private dealings etc etc, they could win brownie points.

But you know it won't stop with screwing around with overseas business. If they are not already, you can bet that internal insider information is going to be traded and sold. You can't trust a rogue, so as long as it is not dismantled they are indirectly if not directly a hostile threat to your ability to conduct business.

jlgaddis5• 13 years ago

If you need me, I'll be off changing every password that I've ever stored in LastPass (incidentally enough, I just realized that their Corporate HQ is just outside Washington, D.C.).

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

Can I spotlight exactly why installing backdoor in software is especially worrisome?

Why is this not just the same as the other clever ways the smart NSA listens in things (not that I'd like but there's something more)?

Well, the thing about backdoors is they get installed on the outside of everyone's software/chips/machines and then ... someone else, someone with less to loose than the NSA, starts to use them for more crudely nefarious reasons, either criminal activity or spying by other nations.

All of this bears resemblance to the former USSR. Once bureaucracy claimed unlimited political power, the next step was for the "mafiya" to take advantage of the universal silence and surveillance.

ivarv• 13 years ago

Shouldn't this result in a drastic devaluation of crypto currencies like bitcoin?

Mordor• 13 years ago

All the more reason for choosing Chinese own brand.

B-Con• 13 years ago

The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

That sounds a lot like "the division to provide security advice was providing advice that would make it easier for the NSA to break".

Page 4 of the article was the most interesting.

zorlem• 13 years ago

I wonder if the recently discovered problems with non-unique key parameters could be the result of the cooperation of particular network gear vendors with NSA.

https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.conference.pdf

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

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